DOLIIO

Doliio is a critical design project revolving around a new species of artificial intelligence capable of representing the real you.

As designers who work with technology, part of our role is to explore the limits of what is possible and to have a point of view about the society in which we live.

In a world of networked systems and ubiquitous computing, life is being lived faster than ever before. Some of the human connection in our social interactions is being lost.

By prototyping an application/service called Doliio, we wanted to highlight the lack of personal connections and demonstrate how willing people are to abandon the responsibility of maintaining personal connections.

RESEARCH

We conducted our research using fairly unorthodox methods: we began our user interviews on Chatroulette - addressing questions of consciousness and the separation between human and artificial intelligences, spoke to chatbots, and recruited our first round of test users using Tinder with a robot-profile, and also via our school network.

Initial users were presented with paper prototypes of the app and onboarding process, and showed an extreme willingness and excitement to have their digital lives being efficiently handled by the bot version of themselves.

Plotting potential features and behaviors for the app on a "creepy vs. useful" graph proved to be one of the most important tools for designing a speculative future. The graph area was divided through by a Line of perfection, Area of WTF, and Preferred and Acceptable area of perfection. We used this as a basis to form our prototypes.

One of our users with whom we conducted in-depth interviews, did a trial run of Doliio over a two-day period and wrote a blog post detailing his experience, which led to press/media coverage (Vice, Der Spiegel) and over 1000+ signups to our newsletter. We also received requests for beta invites and people interested in working with us.